New Year, new Wikipedia list.
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Community Auditions was a Boston area tv show which ran for 37 years. It featured live performances of local folks doing talent show stuff. Dave Maynard, local radio legend, hosted. It was very "of its time" and totally imprinted itself on my partner while I had never heard of it. In the early shows people would vote for their favorite performer via postcard and the results would be announced the following week. In the reboot of the show, you voted via social media.
@jessamyn Oh my god. I never watched it much but just reading that post unraveled a whole corner of assorted local tv memories.
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Community Auditions was a Boston area tv show which ran for 37 years. It featured live performances of local folks doing talent show stuff. Dave Maynard, local radio legend, hosted. It was very "of its time" and totally imprinted itself on my partner while I had never heard of it. In the early shows people would vote for their favorite performer via postcard and the results would be announced the following week. In the reboot of the show, you voted via social media.
Frederick W. W. Howell was a schoolmaster in Birmingham who summered in Iceland in the late 1800s. He was an explorer & outdoorsman and while he was a product of his time (which I've tried to approach honestly) he took some amazing photos of an Iceland, (as reported back home) "on the edge of modernity." The photos got a new life when they were collected and annotated by Cornell librarians. I can find ONE BLURRY PHOTO of the guy, but I wrote this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._W._Howell
#photography #iceland -
@ben_hr Thanks. I'm a sucker for early photographers even though it's not a particularly diverse bunch of folks. But the stuff they were able to capture is really nifty and not the usual stuff. Here's the whole set which Cornell uploaded to Flickr Commons. For some reason a slightly smaller set of those images are on Wikimedia Commons and the Cornell website is good for metadata but also a very old interface.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cornelluniversitylibrary/albums/72157623945632982/
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Frederick W. W. Howell was a schoolmaster in Birmingham who summered in Iceland in the late 1800s. He was an explorer & outdoorsman and while he was a product of his time (which I've tried to approach honestly) he took some amazing photos of an Iceland, (as reported back home) "on the edge of modernity." The photos got a new life when they were collected and annotated by Cornell librarians. I can find ONE BLURRY PHOTO of the guy, but I wrote this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._W._Howell
#photography #icelandI know Fraser Metzger's great grandson who lives up the road from me. He has talked to me about his ancestor's role in the town. I'd been meaning to look him up and wow, that guy did a lot of stuff. Eschewed the family hardware business to go to divinity school, ran for Governor of Vermont as a Progressive and was the first Dean of Men at Rutgers. I started the article yesterday, ran out of steam and was delighted to see that someone else filled in the blanks overnight.
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I know Fraser Metzger's great grandson who lives up the road from me. He has talked to me about his ancestor's role in the town. I'd been meaning to look him up and wow, that guy did a lot of stuff. Eschewed the family hardware business to go to divinity school, ran for Governor of Vermont as a Progressive and was the first Dean of Men at Rutgers. I started the article yesterday, ran out of steam and was delighted to see that someone else filled in the blanks overnight.
@jessamyn do you take suggestions? Because I'm listening to an interview with Reggie Ramos, who was a lead negotiator on the Paris climate accords, a Philippine undersecretary of transportation, then an executive at the MBTA, now a transit justice advocate in MA. seems like someone who should have a wikipedia page! (but i have no interest in writing one, and here you are constantly doing so)
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@jessamyn do you take suggestions? Because I'm listening to an interview with Reggie Ramos, who was a lead negotiator on the Paris climate accords, a Philippine undersecretary of transportation, then an executive at the MBTA, now a transit justice advocate in MA. seems like someone who should have a wikipedia page! (but i have no interest in writing one, and here you are constantly doing so)
@thatandromeda I do, in fact, take suggestions. Would you mind helping and emailing me (jessamyn@gmail) his name and a few details about him and, if you don't mind, a few good sources? I'll be happy to add him to my todo list.
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I know Fraser Metzger's great grandson who lives up the road from me. He has talked to me about his ancestor's role in the town. I'd been meaning to look him up and wow, that guy did a lot of stuff. Eschewed the family hardware business to go to divinity school, ran for Governor of Vermont as a Progressive and was the first Dean of Men at Rutgers. I started the article yesterday, ran out of steam and was delighted to see that someone else filled in the blanks overnight.
I used to write a lot about Stadium Organists when I was listening to Josh Kantor's Seventh Inning Stretch livestream regularly. I'd gotten out of the habit but then I saw Josh Langhoff saying somethingorother on Bluesky and was like "Oh hey there's another one!" Not a lot of public detail about him but he's done a lot of cited music reviews (he's into Christian music and regional Mexican music) and has a nice personal website.
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@jessamyn It’s a funny feeling, creating a wikipedia article and setting it loose in the world. Sometimes people develop it in a way that you like. Sometimes…not.
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I used to write a lot about Stadium Organists when I was listening to Josh Kantor's Seventh Inning Stretch livestream regularly. I'd gotten out of the habit but then I saw Josh Langhoff saying somethingorother on Bluesky and was like "Oh hey there's another one!" Not a lot of public detail about him but he's done a lot of cited music reviews (he's into Christian music and regional Mexican music) and has a nice personal website.
Wikipedia work begets Wikipedia work. Reggie Ramos is the executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts a coalition of groups working to improve transportation in MA. She thinks high quality and affordable and accessible transportation is a civil rights issue. She is from the Republic of the Philippines where she was Undersecretary for Transportation. And she's a lawyer and international negotiator. She's quite cool.
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Wikipedia work begets Wikipedia work. Reggie Ramos is the executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts a coalition of groups working to improve transportation in MA. She thinks high quality and affordable and accessible transportation is a civil rights issue. She is from the Republic of the Philippines where she was Undersecretary for Transportation. And she's a lawyer and international negotiator. She's quite cool.
@jessamyn She is very cool. How is she related to wikipedia?
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@jessamyn She is very cool. How is she related to wikipedia?
@OliviaVespera She's not other than I just wrote that article about her on Wikipedia. That thread is just a compilation of articles I've written this year.
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@OliviaVespera She's not other than I just wrote that article about her on Wikipedia. That thread is just a compilation of articles I've written this year.
@jessamyn Oh sorry, that is very cool! Good on ya for writing a neat aritcle about a very cool person! ^^ I hadn't known it was a thread when it came up on my feed.
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@jessamyn Oh sorry, that is very cool! Good on ya for writing a neat aritcle about a very cool person! ^^ I hadn't known it was a thread when it came up on my feed.
@OliviaVespera Thank you. Everyone's got their "I am trying to make time pass and not get the howling fantods" hobbies and Wikipedia work is mine.
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Wikipedia work begets Wikipedia work. Reggie Ramos is the executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts a coalition of groups working to improve transportation in MA. She thinks high quality and affordable and accessible transportation is a civil rights issue. She is from the Republic of the Philippines where she was Undersecretary for Transportation. And she's a lawyer and international negotiator. She's quite cool.
I'm reading a book about the human body. They discussed the work of a not-well-known poultry scientist who discovered what would become known as B cells from a little gland called the Bursa of Fabricius, written up in the Journal of Poultry Science. I went to read about him and noticed that there were a lot of articles but no Wikipedia page. Science is a little out of my wheelhouse, but I did my best. Meet Bruce Glick, one of the reasons we have decent cancer treatments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Glick -
@kaveinthran It's The Body, a Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson. Super readable and interesting.
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@kaveinthran I've read a few books about Wikipedia. There is one, which is fiction, which feels very "true" which is The Editors by Stephen Harrison. The last non-fiction book I read about it was Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joe Reagle.
It won't surprise you to know that Wikipedia maintains a bibliography about WP-adjacent reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Wikipedia
Of the items on that list, I'd suggest the ones by Ayres and McDowell.
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I'm reading a book about the human body. They discussed the work of a not-well-known poultry scientist who discovered what would become known as B cells from a little gland called the Bursa of Fabricius, written up in the Journal of Poultry Science. I went to read about him and noticed that there were a lot of articles but no Wikipedia page. Science is a little out of my wheelhouse, but I did my best. Meet Bruce Glick, one of the reasons we have decent cancer treatments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_GlickEmily Sweeney does news clips on Insta for The Boston Globe where she's been a staff writer since 2003. She's from Dorchester, has a thick Boston accent. I found that she also writes a lot about Massachusetts crime and authored a book about John "Dropkick" Murphy, an amateur wrestler turned rehab host (yes, where the band got their name). Oh and she was the first woman to play hockey at Boston Latin (on the boys' team) and played four years at Northeastern.
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Emily Sweeney does news clips on Insta for The Boston Globe where she's been a staff writer since 2003. She's from Dorchester, has a thick Boston accent. I found that she also writes a lot about Massachusetts crime and authored a book about John "Dropkick" Murphy, an amateur wrestler turned rehab host (yes, where the band got their name). Oh and she was the first woman to play hockey at Boston Latin (on the boys' team) and played four years at Northeastern.
The Framingham Eight were women serving time for killing their abusive spouses/partners in Massachusetts. They sought commutation of their sentences in the 1990s saying they were acting in self defense because of battered person syndrome. Seven of the eight received commuted sentences; many had difficult lives afterwards either in or out of the spotlight. A short documentary about them won an Oscar. They had no Wikipedia page. Most news articles about them are by women.
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Emily Sweeney does news clips on Insta for The Boston Globe where she's been a staff writer since 2003. She's from Dorchester, has a thick Boston accent. I found that she also writes a lot about Massachusetts crime and authored a book about John "Dropkick" Murphy, an amateur wrestler turned rehab host (yes, where the band got their name). Oh and she was the first woman to play hockey at Boston Latin (on the boys' team) and played four years at Northeastern.
@jessamyn She sounds absolutely awesome, even through that Wikipedian “Neutral” ooint of view!
